


Being Edith

by orphan_account



Category: Captain Underpants Series - Dav Pilkey
Genre: Alien Edith, Liiiiitle bit of Egg Casserole, just a little bit, oh my god I just want her to be an alien so badly, so badly I don't think you guys understand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 09:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11310336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She's not HVC 7.1- 355, and she's not really Edith Anthrope.She's just Edith, and it took her a long time to come to that.





	Being Edith

**Author's Note:**

> SO MANY OF YOU asked me to write Edith as an Alien in 'It's Hard'. 
> 
> Just because I can't do it there doesn't mean I won't do it at all ;) 
> 
> (I have to give a huge amount of the credit to genalovestoons, who chatted with me for at least an hour about all the different ways the Captain Underpants movies could write Edith as an Alien. It was a wonderful conversation that really got the gears in my head turning. Everyone, give the lady a hand!) 
> 
> I tried to write this (at least the beginning of this) in the style of those 1950's sci-fi stories. In particular, I re-read Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, which I HIGHLY recommend. An audio recording of the story can be found HERE.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0
> 
> Cheers!

       Edith lives a very habitual existence.

       For example, she knows every week day morning will begin at 6am when her alarm goes off but not officially start until 6:30 by which time she has had her coffee, a cheesy scrambled egg, brushed her teeth, put on her face, and donned the uniform required to work at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School where she will arrive at 7 to prepare breakfast for all the kids who are signed up to receive it.

       The breakfast consists of orange juice, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a single apple.

       It never changes.

       She also knows that the lunch goes by a weekly rotating schedule that never changes either. Every day she can trust that, as it has been since she started working, the same food options will need to be prepared and she will place them in the same order.

       For example, Tuesday means egg sandwiches, sloppy joes, milk, apple juice, orange juice, and tapioca pudding.

       Cleanup always starts at 12:30, and Edith always starts with putting the left overs away before wiping down the counter tops. She moves through the serving station, then the oven, the warmer, the refrigerator and freezer, before finally transitioning to the cafeteria to systematically clean down the tables.

       Her job is done by 2.

       She enjoys it.

       There are, however, few rituals involved in coming home. The first thing she does upon coming through the door is check to make sure that she locked it behind her. This is followed by the removal of her gloves, her shoes, and her wig, on account of the fact that they all itch terribly. After that, the world is her oyster; her actions are of her own volition.

       She enjoys this more.  

       All around though, she’s glad she got to be Edith Anthrope.

       Of all the 7.1 generation clones, she feels she lucked out. The human with whom she shares a sizable chunk of her genetic code with had a comfortable job, a comfortable home, a fairly quiet life. The 4.4 named Jaquez that she watched get sucked out the air lock for failing to secure standing at a local grocery store shortly before her deployment was not half as well built as she is nor half as well off. You could tell he was a Xaxion-human clone hybrid, in his face, in his body. She wonders sometimes if that is why he failed, that it was more a problem with the cloning process than it was his inability to blend with the humans.

       Not that she is perfect.

       She had been made to partake in the Direct Brain Transfer, as all 6.0 models and newer are. She saw the life of the real Edith Anthrope, the memories and the reactions to them, the way things were processed and the way the emotions they harbored grew and died. She could say, and would be correct in doing so, that she knows the real Edith Anthrope better than the real Edith Anthrope knew herself. In that way, she has an advantage over that unfortunate 4.4 model.

       That doesn’t MAKE her that Edith Anthrope, though.

       The real Edith Anthrope, the one with the fingers and hair and feet, the one who was wholly human, she is in a deep sleep container secured on a shuttle floating somewhere out in the asteroid belt of this solar system. All the dreams and desires that were hers, uniquely hers, sleep there in that tube with her. She will stay there until the Xaxions have no more use for her and then, it is entirely possible, her body will be jetted out into space to join that 4.4 model, to join all the other failures and traitors of the Vivitar Empire.

       Edith knows she could just as easily be terminated if they had any idea that she was Edith, not Edith Anthrope anymore, not HVC 7.1- 355.

       It took a long time for Edith to come to terms with the fact that she wanted to live.

       (In all truth, she’s still trying to figure it out.)

       Humans see what they want to see though, and will ignore the rest. They like order and neat boxes and clean lines. They like what they can understand and, what they cannot understand, they will beat with definitions and analysis until, finally, the thing falls in line with what they believe to be true.

       The Xaxions, too, work like this. They had told her that following protocol was the only way she would survive, that being Edith Anthrope, staying Edith Anthrope, was tantamount to existence. There was to be nothing else.

       Time is funny though, and people are stubborn. Perhaps it was the human genetics, perhaps it was just the years away from the orbiting Vivitar station, but somewhere in between the two she started to see that the their boxes couldn’t handle the scope of reality, couldn’t contain what it meant to really live.

       Everything is so much more complicated.

       So long as she looks like Edith Anthrope, to them, she is Edith Anthrope, regardless of whether or not this is true. So long as she doesn’t give herself away, she can continue to exist.

       There are chunks of the real Edith Anthrope, to be fair, bits of her in the cerebral coding, that are so visceral it takes Edith by surprise sometimes. The real Edith Anthrope hated pickles, for example, but the first time Edith fought through that and actually tried one, she found she rather enjoyed it.

       There are other things, however.

       Things such as the fact that the real Edith Anthrope loved redundancy.

       Edith knows why, knows it stems for a desire for stability, comes from decades of wanting dependability.  She can think back on the memories that are not hers and understand, but that doesn’t mean she can comply.

       (Will, it’s a matter of will, it’s a matter of wanting her own kind of validation that she exists beyond the skin she was given.)

       Once in a fit of curiosity and a desire to understand what exactly it meant to be an Edith, and entity unto herself, she walked into the city public library. A quick search through the dictionary held no results, nor the encyclopedia, but in a book on the etymology of names she found that hers was a combination of two words which had fallen out of use.

       There was ‘ead’, which meant wealth and fortune, and then there was ‘gyð’, which meant war.

       Truth be told, she couldn’t really make heads or tails of that either. She didn’t feel like a fortune of war.

       It was later though, as she was typing up her reports, as she was thinking about the inevitable destruction of Earth under the heel of the Vivitar Empire, that it clicked.

       She was fortunate enough to exist because of war.

       (That took a while to process.)

       That was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however. Looking back, it’s almost laughable.

       There is so much of Edith Anthrope that she isn’t now, even if everyone believes her to be inside of that nice, straight edged box. People will think that all is well if you look the part regardless of whether or not you play the part, and she cannot play the part anymore.

       What is worse still in her view is that people willingly put themselves in those boxes. People willingly devolve their lives to be nothing more than caricatures of existing, shadows of personality and thought, so long as they think it will make living more bearable.

       Children will tailor who they are in order to have friends, and adults will slice away at themselves to have allies. From her position at the counter, from her perches around the city, Edith has watched the lonely chop off proverbial limbs in order to make a connection with someone, anyone.

       Those who don’t comply suffer.

       She is not sure if this is because of an inability to process in liminality or if it is a product of survival. Edith has dwelled on the fact that, perhaps, it is she who is broken, not the world around her. However, the more she looks, the more she finds that there are others, people who just don’t fit into any boxes and have given up on trying.

       She knows only a few who choose that.

       (Benjamin is one, though there are days she wishes he would just succumb because she is so tired of seeing him so tired. The man deserves better.)

       Though she wasn’t sure if she should have found that out. Perhaps she was looking too hard, perhaps she was watching him too much, but when one right guess lead to one right answer, then another guess, then another answer, she found him too fascinating to look away.

       (Then again, you only need to see a man fighting the unstoppable forces of humanity’s own desire for destruction in his underwear once to know there’s more than meets the eye.)

       So if Edith deviates, if Edith strays, if Edith lives less like Edith Anthrope and more like a fortune of war, more like she owns the skin she has, she can’t exactly blame herself. She is aware of the times, aware of the hours as they disappear, cognizant of the fact this cannot last, that she will not last, that she will eventually face an end.

       Until then though, Edith will take her time reading through the romances in the library, will listen to the birds sing, will let the distant screech of train wheels on tracks lull her to sleep. She will try and fail to grow plants on her windowsills, will try and fail in her endeavors to make a pie crust from scratch, will try and fail to paint the tip of her hands to make it look like she has finger nails, will try and fail and try again to figure out how to accurately show her love for the world that she has claimed as her own.

       She will go on loving the weeds in the sidewalk cracks and eating the light of the sunrise like they are the last things she will ever see.

       Until the inevitable end, Edith will live.


End file.
